Recent North Texas deportees try to make sense of a home they’ve never really known

It was not until Jonathan Celis stood 100 feet from the Texas-Mexico border carrying nothing but two T-shirts, a pair of pants and a dead cell phone that he realized he would be deported from the United States, the country the 31-year-old has called home since he was 8 years old. 

He’d avoided thinking about this possibility after getting arrested at a probation hearing in August 2025. He’d denied that it would come to this during the next four months that he spent in a Texas detention center. And that December morning, even as he was loaded onto a crowded bus and driven south, there was still a part of him that could not comprehend that within a few hours he’d be told to walk across a bridge over the Rio Grande into a country that is his in legal terms only.

At that moment, shuffling across the southern border, Celis was numb. Some of the men around him cried. Others rejoiced, happy to be free. He was quickly met by volunteers who bombarded him with questions — did he need shelter, did he need clothing, was he fed, was he healthy, where did he plan to go next? — before handing him 2,000 pesos and an ID card that identified him as a recent deportee. They also gave him a voucher good for one bus ride, a friendly way of saying “you can’t stay here.” 

With that skimpy inventory of belongings, Celis began the process of starting his life over. 

Celis is one of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who began this process last year after President Donald Trump took office and initiated the country’s most significant immigration crackdown in a decade. While it is not clear how many people were deported from the U.S. last year, the Department of Homeland Security took credit for “more than 400,000 deportations” since the year’s start. The Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that the figure is somewhere closer to 310,000 to 315,000 deportations. 

Some of the most high-profile crackdowns, from mistaken deportations to the killing of U.S. citizens by ICE agents, have resulted in thousands of headlines. A March 2026 Harvard Kennedy School poll suggests that only 37% of Americans approve of the hardliner policies. 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran man who first came to the U.S. as a teenager, became the face of the administration’s massive deportation effort after he was detained by agents and sent to his home country’s notorious CECOT mega-prison against the orders of a federal immigration judge. 

Investigative reporting by ProPublica found that in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, at least 170 U.S. citizens had been detained by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. ICE agents are permitted to hold people suspected of being in the country illegally, and nearly all of the affected Americans were Latino, ProPublica found. In some cases, detainees were held for weeks before being released. 

As much attention has been given to Abrego Garcia and the U.S. citizens who have found themselves in the crosshairs of sweeping immigration enforcement, there are hundreds of thousands of individuals whose stories haven’t been told. 

In some cases, they have found themselves forced into countries they do not know. They’ve had to handle lost jobs and family separations; cars, apartments and financial obligations have been abandoned, defaulted on or seized during months of detainment. They have lost their personal effects, their wardrobes and their pets. In the process, some have lost their sense of self. 

“There’s just no way I could be the same person I was before, after all this,” Celis recently told the Observer in a video call from Tijuana. “I’m hopeful that I will be able to go back to the U.S. one day and be reunited with my family. [In the meantime], it’s just time to grow up. To figure out who I am.” 

No room for mistakes

Celis remembers his dad coming to North Texas before the rest of the family followed a year later. He was raised with the understanding that his parents had left Mexico to find “a better life” for their children, but the family also acknowledged that they “were different.” His parents routinely explained to their three children that consequences for their family wouldn’t necessarily look like the consequences their peers faced. 

Celis was young when he qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was started by President Barack Obama. The program grants conditional residency to children who entered the U.S. illegally prior to 2007. “Dreamers” must renew their status every two years to remain eligible for deferred action and employment authorization. 

DACA protected Celis and his siblings as they grew up in Plano. He graduated from Plano Senior High School and moved to Los Angeles for film school. After graduating, he returned to Collin County, where his dad had built a home big enough for Celis and his nephews to live. He started a podcast with his best friend that was gaining traction, and “life was pretty good.” 

When Trump took office, Celis worried more for his parents than for himself. His DACA status wouldn’t need to be renewed until October 2025, but his parents were still undocumented.

“We knew that things were changing quick, especially here in Texas,” Celis said. “We were just keeping more of a low profile. I mean, we still did our own thing. We still went out, we still did things, but we knew we had to be more careful.” 

Unbeknownst to Celis, he was already on ICE’s radar. For several years after returning to Texas, he’d struggled with his mental health, and that culminated in a 2024 arrest for driving under the influence. It was a wake-up call, Celis said. From that moment on, he realized he was “on the wrong path.” 

He began attending intensive therapy, served his required public service and completed his probation. It was at his third probation hearing in August 2025 that he was approached by an immigration agent and told, “The laws are changing.” 

“That’s when they started handcuffing me, and they got their badges out that said ICE,” he said. 

In initiating his deportation plan, Trump has promised to go after “the worst of the worst.” That has not necessarily been the case, though. According to internal Department of Homeland Security documents obtained by NBC News, less than 14% of the immigrants arrested last year by ICE had charges or convictions for violent offenses. Forty-six percent of detainees had nonviolent offenses on their records, like Celis, and 40% of those arrested had committed no crime other than civil immigration violations. 

DWI and DUI charges were the third-most common criminal charge among individuals arrested by ICE, with nearly 30,000 detainees identified. The DHS document specifies that a person’s most serious crime is listed within the internal data system. 

FBI data suggests that between May 2025 and May 2026, 686,583 Americans were arrested for driving under the influence. For most first-time offenders who do not cause injury, there may be a stint in jail, a fine, a temporary license suspension and probation. 

For Celis, it cost him the life he’s always known. He has never attempted to excuse what he did to get arrested originally, but he found out what his parents always meant when they warned his mistakes wouldn’t be weighed the same as his friends’ in the most unforgiving way. 

“By the time I got arrested by ICE a year [after my arrest], I had been in therapy for a full year. And I think that prepared me for what was going to be coming,” Celis said. “I did make a mistake, and I’m always going to regret that mistake … but I also think it shouldn’t have erased 23 years of my life. It was the first thing, the only thing I had on my record.” 

A financial cost

For weeks, Chih-Ming “Petey” Feng has wondered what happened to his car. It’s a black 2022 Toyota Corolla, and if anyone sees it, he’d like to know. 

Like Celis, Feng spent 23 years in the United States only to have his life upended by a years-old DWI charge that he’d thought was taken care of. He was a cook at some of Dallas’ highest-profile restaurants before he was picked up by ICE at an immigration check-in. After that, he spent four months bouncing between Texas detention centers, where he struggled to understand the intricacies of his case, his rights, how to communicate with the outside world and how to access funds to buy basic commissary goods. 

Despite all that, he has a relatively positive outlook on the experience, now that he is back in Taiwan and living with his parents.

“I didn’t pray for 23 years in Texas,” he said. In detention, he learned to pray. Deprivation taught him to appreciate sunlight and fresh food. The simple things in life. 

What is really bothering him is the money of it all. When Feng suddenly disappeared, he failed to pay rent. He’d been in the same apartment since 2006, and when he was finally deported and able to access his resident payment portal, he was met with more than $5,000 in late fines and eviction warnings. Of course, by that point, he was no longer in the country. 

His credit cards had accumulated hundreds of dollars in late fees, with interest fees pushing one balance over $2,000. His internet and phone bills were hundreds of dollars overdue, and his bank had shut off his debit card, flagging fraud. Between the time difference (Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of Texas) and Feng’s general uncertainty about everything in his life, it took two weeks after he was deported just to restore access to his bank account. 

It’s all hard to swallow for someone who “never paid his bills late” in more than two decades in the U.S. 

“It created a situation [where] I became a debt in society. I was a 21-year Costco member. Faithfully, I paid my bills,” Feng told the Observer. “I never abused SNAP or [the] Medicaid system. I had an appendix removal surgery, and I paid in full by myself. … [After my car accident] I paid all medical, ambulance and lab reports.” 

As for what happened to his personal items, it’s anybody’s guess. Some of his chef-grade cooking equipment is accounted for, but shipping it across the world would cost a fortune. He might be able to pay for it, though, if he manages to find and sell his car. Friends have told him it isn’t in his apartment complex’s parking lot, and calls to his landlord, the police department and his insurance company have been fruitless. 

“Car insurance can’t cover it, police can’t do a report for me because I don’t have a valid American phone number anymore,” Feng said. 

Feng has found himself, quite literally, on an island.

Across the U.S., some immigration advocacy groups have set up educational programs to help undocumented individuals prepare for how to handle their finances if deported. The Resurrection Project in Chicago helps homeowners plan what to do with their mortgages. Dallas’ Vecinos Unidos encourages at-risk families to make lists of bills that may need to be turned off, along with the passwords to each account. 

Other communities are going even further to prepare. In January 2025, ProPublica reported that a community of Wisconsin Nicaraguans had begun shipping belongings back to their home country in anticipation of their seemingly inevitable deportations. 

“We don’t have much, but what we do have is important,” one man, Joaquín, told the outlet. 

Now, on the other side of it, Feng said he believes the process of plucking people off the streets and sending them, months later, to a foreign country without allowing them time to sort out their personal affairs, “is stupid.” With the help of his family, Feng has committed to paying off the remaining debts he owed in the U.S., wiping his slate clean for good. He’s paid off the credit card fees and the apartment penalties so far. 

He bought six T-shirts and a few pairs of jeans from a Taiwanese Costco. He gets around on a moped, and he’s enjoying the slower pace of life and the reunion with his parents. He considers himself fortunate to have a place in Taiwan to come home to; others aren’t so lucky as to know the language or have family in the country they’re sent to. 

“Sometimes I get a little bit emotional about my future. … I want to have faith. I want to believe that people are good, not that people are bad,” Feng said. “I want to believe that I have a good chance here.” 

Starting over

One day after being deported, Celis was on a 15-hour bus to Mexico City. By a stroke of luck, a family friend was slated for a vacation in the capital and was able to bring a suitcase of some of his valuables, including his Mexican passport and laptop. The 2,000 pesos he’d been handed at the border “didn’t last long,” but they got him to a place where he could finally claim something familiar. 

Along the border, the Mexican government has launched a program to receive deportees like Celis and reintegrate them into the country. The plan, Mexico Embraces You, was President Claudia Sheinbaum’s response to Trump’s “unilateral move” of dumping thousands of deportees at the border. The goal is exactly what Celis experienced: If you’re healthy, take a moment to catch your breath, grab a plate of warm grub, then please move along.  

A similar reabsorption program has been launched in Guatemala to offer a “dignified reception” to individuals who may have fled the country decades ago. 

“We know they’re worried,” Carlos Ramiro Martínez, the foreign minister, told The New York Times. “They’re living with immense fear, and as the government, we can’t just say, ‘Look, we’re also scared for you.’ We have to do something.”

Being detained can cause extreme psychiatric stress, the American Psychological Association reports, and anxiety, depression and PTSD can be compounded when a person is finally deported. Mental health effects are typically more substantial if the deportee migrated as a child or if it has been decades since the person returned to their home country. They can find themselves disoriented or isolated as locals fail to “understand the experiences they had in the United States,” wrote Claudia Masferrer, an associate professor and researcher at the Centre for Demographic, Urban and Environmental Studies of El Colegio de México in Mexico City.

Celis experienced his fair share of mental health challenges while detained, and he was emotional during his early days in Mexico. He traveled to Tijuana, where extended family he’d not seen in over a decade promised to take him in, and was surprised by how metropolitan the city is. Many of the shops carry the same snacks he loved in the U.S., and when he FaceTimes his family he gloats about “the stuff I’m eating that they would probably want to be eating, or the places that they would want to be seeing.” 

He didn’t realize how few memories he had of Mexico until the country turned out to be nothing as he expected. He was raised with an Americanized view of the country. Now, months later, he is able to joke about how he’d almost expected a hazy yellow filter to fall over the world the moment he crossed the border. 

Family members in Tijuana helped Celis get an official ID card, which then allowed him to open a bank account. He hasn’t been able to land a job yet, although everyone he meets swears that being bilingual will help him find something. 

On the bad days, he misses his nephews more than seems bearable. On the good days, he writes. He plans to self-publish a book later this year detailing his four months in ICE custody and the process of finding his footing in a new country. 

“I’m trying to make the best out of it now,” Celis said. “I knew that eventually I would want to tell [my] story. … It’s really about rebuilding from nothing and starting over. And it’s possible to do it. No matter what mistakes you’ve made, it is possible to continue your life.”